Document Type
Article
Publication Date
12-4-2025
Abstract
Science experiments on the International Space Station (ISS) and in future space habitats require “facilities,” as they are known to space agencies, as the core building blocks of the research capabilities they provide. Facilities are experimental apparatus that enable research, often (but not always) used for more than one experiment, such as centrifuges, furnaces, gloveboxes, freezers, and more. The US Orbital Segment of the ISS has been home to 191 such facilities, belonging to four of the five ISS international partner agencies as well as private companies, in its 25 years of continuous operation. Until now, there has been no public accounting or modeling of how they are used. Here, we present a statistical analysis of the usage of ISS facilities, based on data scraped from more than 4000 ISS daily reports dating from 2009 to 2024. The results are presented by facility and by facility category (as designated by NASA and as designated by us), and for both individual and pairwise use. By drawing this picture of research activity on the first permanently crewed space habitat in low Earth orbit, we provide insights that are useful for the design and planning of the next generation of space stations, including the co-location of facilities that tend to be used together as part of a broad space-based infrastructure. Raw data and code for replication and further analysis are available in the GitHub repository of this paper.
Recommended Citation
Justin St. P. Walsh, Rao Hamza Ali, Ryan Shihabi, Erik Linstead, Facility Usage on the International Space Station, Acta Astronautica 244 (2026) 481-508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2025.11.056
Peer Reviewed
1
Copyright
The authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Comments
This article was originally published in Acta Astronautica, volume 244, in 2026. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actaastro.2025.11.056